Dobson Central Photography

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to sit down and write much about the goings on around here.  Today is no different, however I wanted to make a quick note.  If you’ve been watching the main page, you’ve already seen quite a few photos from Monument Valley.  I finally finished going through them and processing the ones that were worthy of spending time with.  The last of the Monument Valley photos will post on February 2nd.

Now, the main reason I wanted to post a quick note.  I’ve always known the importance of this, but I got bit hard, and I do mean hard.  It’s not only important but it is vital to make sure your sensor is super clean before taking a special trip for photography such as the one I took to Monument Valley.  Had I known that my sensor was this dirty, I obviously would have had it cleaned and it would have saved me HOURS of cleaning the dirt out of most of my Monument Valley photos.  The odd thing is, during the normal hours of the day, the dirt wasn’t as noticeable.  A few of the larger spots that were easy to clean/fix showed, but the little spots were mostly invisible.  The bulk of the dirt/dust appeared to showed its ugly head in low light situations (early morning and evening).  Below are several cropped sections of just one unprocessed photo.  This shows you just how bad dirt/dust can be.

The sad thing is, on the original, these spots are much more apparent than what you see in the photos above.  Needless to say, I just got my camera back from Tucson Camera and I’m happy to say my camera is clean again.  While I may be $45 lighter in the wallet, my time will be better spent taking photos and not processing out dirt in every one of my photos.

So, take it from me.  Get your camera cleaned before a momentous photography trip.  It’s money well spent instead of spending 20+ hours processing dirt out of your photos.

Liquid Image is releasing a High Definition Scuba Series Camera / Video Mask at the 2009 CES show in Las Vegas January 8th – 11th. The Liquid Image SCUBA SERIES HD320 Camera / Video Mask allows scuba divers to capture underwater photos and High Definition digital video hands free. The HD video is 720P (1280 x 720) and records at a rate up to 30 frames per second with audio. The camera mode features a 5 MP (2560 x 1920) still image.

How cool is this and remarkably priced as well.  Too bad there’s not much use for this in Arizona, or it’d be on my next Christmas birthday wish list.  Read more here.

My Mom and I have decided to do a project that I’ve been thinking about for a while now.  It’s a macro lens project that hopefully will force me out of my normal routine and make me pay better attention to the things that most people overlook. Not to mention, brush off the dust on the macro lens. Good or bad, I will be publishing 31 photos (1 for each day of the month in December), starting December 1st. 

The rules are simple. 1 photo for each day of December. Anything goes, as long as each photo is taken with a macro lens. It doesn’t have to be “macro” in size. Photos must be completed by December 1st in time for posting (basically two weekends for me).

Sounds easy enough, but I’m such a picky person and never post anything that I wouldn’t hang in my house, so this is going to be a little difficult for me. So, stay tuned to the main page as well as my Mom’s site and be sure to comment on each photo. Some of them may be odd without any explanation of what they are. It’ll be up to you to figure them out. If you have a web site or blog and want to participate, post your web site in the comments below where everyone can check out your shots.

I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve never bought a camcorder and missed transferring thousands of hours of video over to 500 VHS tapes of my son growing up, the fact that this has way more megapixels than I’ll ever need or the fact that the 5D Mark II is a much better camera than I’ve ever owned.  All I know is the high definition video this DSLR camera can take is outstanding and has people drooling.

There’s all sorts of chatter on the net about what this camera can offer, so I won’t bore you with the details.  Instead, here are some quick links to the awesome videos that are being posted out there.  Click on any of the images below to see the videos.

Hands down, the best video to surface yet:

I never thought I’d want to own a camera and video recorder combo.  In fact, I’ve never wanted a point and shoot camera, just because I’d rather focus on photography and have a selection of lenses to choose from for the right moment.  The quality of these videos is changing my mind.  If I owned this, it would be a nice feature great feature to have, but I believe I’d still primarily shoot photos.  I came pretty close to replacing my stolen camera with the 5D, but I would have had to give up a lens or two.  I wasn’t about to cut my legs, so the 30D was the right choice at that time.  The extra features the 5D and now the 5D Mark II has over the 30D, as far as photography is concerned, is awesome in its own right.  The video capabilities would just be added icing on the cake for me.

Adorama first published 100 photography tips in 100 days last year.  Just a few months ago, they published Part II with another 100 tips.  Enter Part III. It won’t be finished for another 91 days, so keep tuning in for more.

With over 200 tips so far, and more coming each day, there’s bound to be something for everyone, even a refresher on something long forgotten.

After a few issues, Dobson Central appears to be back to working properly on the new host/server.  If you experience any issues, please let me know.  I ran into a few problems already, such as missing photos that somehow didn’t get transferred over.

I should be resuming posting new photos shortly.  I just have a couple of other fires to put out with the new server, so hopefully come Monday, there will be something new to look at on the main page.  Thanks for being patient!

Ken

Dobson Central will most likely be having an outage some time this week.  I’ve grown tired of the reponse times on my hosting server relating to mySQL and have decided to take the plunge and move.  I’m hoping for minimal downtime with no data loss.  Hopefully everything works out ok.

My wife and I had no idea where to take a vacation this year. We had some thoughts, but nothing really seemed to click. That is, until my sister-in-law wrote her annual nag message asking when we were going to come visit her in podunk heights, Wisconsin. We’ve never been to her place and she comes to Tucson almost every year. Since we didn’t have any definite plans, I suggested we take a flight out to Wisconsin. The idea seemed to click with both my wife and I. After looking into taking a flight out there, I started looking into taking a road trip. With the price of gas these days and getting 15-18 MPG with our SUV, it’s pretty much the same in costs, as far as gas vs airline tickets. So, I plotted out a trip to see some some places of interest in the U.S. That’s when this vacation really clicked with us. It’s a round about way to get to Wisconsin, however, we’ll get to see exciting things instead of sitting in a plane sucking in recirculated air from 200+ other passengers. Click on the map below to see the trip on Google maps and you can zoom in and see all the different areas I’ll be visiting. Just close the annoying directions pane on the left (click the little tiny blue arrow to close it down).

The sites to see? For a family, they’re pretty neat. We’ll get to camp out and see some national parks. This is something I haven’t done since I was a kid. For a photographer, it’s going to be über cool.

• Bryce Canyon, Utah
• Jenny Lake, Wyoming
• Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming
• Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
• Devil’s Tower, Wyoming
• Mount Rushmore, South Dakota
• The Badlands, South Dakota
• Arches National Park, Utah
• Canyon De Chelly, Arizona

Each of the links above, will show you some Google images, for those that haven’t seen these places. Due to the time it’s going to take us to get to Wisconsin, I wish I could say we’d be spending several days in each location, but unfortunately that’s not the case. 4 days to get there, 4 days to stay and 3 days to get back. Out of this entire trip, all I asked is that we allow me some time to get some sunset photos at Bryce Canyon. It’s a place I’ve never been to and have wanted to go there for some time now. So, if I can come away with a couple of photos to be proud of from Bryce Canyon, I’ll be extremely happy.

The rest of this trip, in my mind, is going to be a teaser for my family. It’ll let them know what they are missing and perhaps we can do a family trip in two years to Yellowstone and the Grand Teton’s for a week. Even then, we could probably spend a month having a blast there, but a week would be great. As it is, by the time we get to Yellowstone, we’ll set up camp in the evening, break down the camp in the early morning and see what we can of Yellowstone up until 3 pm (provided we have good weather) before getting on the road for another 8 hours. Not much time to do a whole lot, but I hope we can at least see Old Faithful and some of the hot springs.

The rest of the trip will be pretty much the same. We’ll be stopping to see the sites, take some photos, but not staying for a whole lot of time in any one location. As for photos, I’ll take what I can get, even though most of the sites won’t be happening during the magical hours of early morning or evening. With neutral density and polarizing filters, I’m hopeful to take home some keeper shots.

On the way home, we’re driving through scenic Colorado to Arches National Park near Moab, Utah. Then we’re headed down to Canyon De Chelly and then straight home. We’ll pretty much be driving as much as we can (12-15 hours a day, maybe longer) on the way home.

Since I’ll be in River Falls, Wisconsin (I’ve never heard of it before either, so don’t feel ashamed ), I plan on getting some photos in Minneapolis, which is just across the river. I have scouted a few locations to take some photos of, but only time will tell if I’m able to get them all in. If you have any suggestions/requests for Minneapolis photos, please post them in a comment below. We depart tomorrow, so I’ll most likely have to check/read any comment(s) when I arrive in Wisconsin.

That’s it for our trip for the most part. I wish we could spend more time in each location, but as I mentioned earlier, it’s a teaser/sneak peak for the rest of the family. I just want to have a great time and come away with some fantastic scenic photos. If I’m lucky, we’ll be doing a national park tour in Utah and Wyoming for two weeks in 2010. By 2015, I hope to be touring Denali State Park in Alaska!!!

I was pleasantly surprised two days ago when my wife gave me my early birthday present. I didn’t expect a present, since we are heading out on a huge road trip (more on that in the next post). With the price of gas, can you say “Ka-ching”? I also didn’t expect to receive the Epson P-3000. It’s a gadget I’ve had my eye on for quite a long time now, but just haven’t had the need to justify it. That is, until we decided to go on this road trip. I’ve been stressing about how in the world I was going to take photos over a 10 day period and store them all on two 2 gig memory cards. I had some plans. Take less photos. Be vigilant in deleting really bad photos. Upload them to my host when I could gain access to a computer, so I could free up the memory card space.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to go to all that trouble. My wife decided to shock the hell out of me by giving me the Epson P-3000. A 40 gig, multimedia storage viewer.

The 4 inch screen on this has excellent detail (16.7 million colors) and is just awesome. It’s so much better than viewing it on the back of the camera. Plus, you can zoom in and it displays RAW files. It slices, it dices, oh wait. That’s something else. It not only allows me to easily backup my images and view them, but it also has “extras” on it. For what I need this for, I don’t need the “extras”, but they are nice. Slide show capabilities, with music if you please. It plays videos and MP3’s. I even went and purchased an auxiliary cable yesterday and plugged it into the vehicle we are taking on the trip. I figure about 20 gigs of MP3’s should give us about 75 hours of music. Way better than burning 25+ CD’s.

On the side of the P-3000, it has a high speed USB 2.0 connection for copying files to and from your computer. I haven’t timed it, but it appears to copy a lot faster than when I copy my memory cards over to my computer. Very nice feature!! It also has an audio/video out and a host connector on the side.

The top of the Epson P-3000 has two slots for SD and Compact Flash cards. Just plop them in, choose backup and before you know it, your card has been successfully copied over. There’s an option to erase memory card after it’s done copying, however, to me it’s a little risky to have that on. You never know when a hardware failure may happen. No need to destroy your photos on your memory card until you are absolutely sure they copied over and are not corrupt.

The bottom line? The Epson P-3000 just plain rocks! It’s going to come in handy for my upcoming trip and next year, when we take our genetic experiment (our almost 9 year old son) to Disney World. If the 40 gig hard drive isn’t enough for you, Epson offers an 80 gig hard drive in the P-5000.